A visually satisfying tape ticker

This visually stunning tape ticker prints out [Horatius Steam’s] emails for him. It watches his email address for a secret trigger phrase in the subject line. Sure, thermal receipt printer projects are becoming rather common, but we can’t remember seeing one that took this much time and effort to make it into a showpiece.

The two parts that make this happen are the thermal printer with cutter module and the glass dome which is just large enough to house the business end of it. The driver PCB for the printer is hidden in the base (a paper tube which is painted to took like wood), which positions the outfeed near the bottom of the dome. This had the added benefit of leaving plenty of room for [Horatius] to proudly display the paper roll. Since the receipt printer is designed to work with a Windows machine there was no custom circuitry necessary.

Very nicely done. I’ve always been attracted to old-timey ticker-tape machines. Unfortunately real ones sell for the billions they were probably once responsible for, so this is a attractive modern take. Makes me wish I had those kinda skills /sigh…

OK, I was gonna ask how one would paint cardboard to look like wood, but after reading the Instuctable(ugh!)I read that the cardboard was stained to match the color of the other actual pieces of wood, and was not actually painted to look like wood. Very nice build, though. Not being a steampunk fan, I really cringed when I read “glue on gears”. LOL…